Today I decided to try 2.4.19 with the pre8 patch, this seems to have resolved
the problem so far. It finishes checking /var and proceeds to the next
partitions and the boot process completes.
After my next full backup I will try to reproduce this again with 2.4.18-4.I did
notice some fixes in the changelog, but It is beyond my scope to try to relate
these. It almost looks like more of an ide problem if you want my two cents. The
reason I say that is the next partiton after /var is /dev/dev/hdb1 that it checks.